


Hex is Hope

by Merkwerkee



Series: Pilots of ARENA [1]
Category: Masters of the Metaverse
Genre: Canon, Gladiators, Slavery, s6 e12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:53:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22856548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: When Rosie Harvin tapped her well of magic to bring a message of hope to all the enslaved metapilots in the festering city of Collyseum, some of them reacted better than others
Series: Pilots of ARENA [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643143





	Hex is Hope

_Hope is the thing with feathers  
That perches in the soul,  
And sings the tune–without the words,  
And never stops at all._

—————————————————————————————————

Garrett lay in bed and stared at the featureless ceiling. He did that a lot on days when he didn’t have training or a fight; sometimes he switched things up by staring at the equally featureless walls. The five by seven foot cell that his owners kept him in when they didn’t need him for anything offered not nearly enough room to pace and so Garrett spent most of his time laying in the bed and staring at the nothing-much that was the whole of the cell.

He used to spend his time here plotting. Plotting his revenge against the wispy almost-men that captured him and brought him here, revenge against the owners who’d bought and sold him, countless escape plans that took him back to the idyllic fields of home - but he’d given that up long ago. Nowadays he mostly thought about nothing much at all, his mind as blank and as dull as the walls around him.

It hadn’t always been this dull; the previous owners he’d had had thought that mental stimulation would make him a better competitor and had given him all sorts of things to keep him busy. Mostly exercise equipment and video games designed to enhance his reflexes, sure, but that had at least been something to do. Those days had ended when that compound had been raided and destroyed, and Garrett had been taken as spoils and sold to his current owners.

Garrett sighed and rolled over to stare at the featureless wall. No point in thinking about what had been. No point in worrying about the future either; he’d fight until someone got in a lucky punch and then he’d die. He’d thought of throwing matches to make it happen faster, but the nanites in his bloodstream boiled at any sign of weakness and he’d discarded those thoughts too.

He blinked slowly, more for the dryness in his eyes than out of any real desire to move, and in between the closing of the lids and the opening of them again, something changed. The wall he stared at now - the wall he’d stared at for, _gods_ , years - was no longer featureless. Now there was something on it.

He blinked again but the image didn’t go away. He reached up and rubbed his eyes; still the image stayed stubbornly on the wall. He sat up. The image was still there. Slowly he stood and walked over with knees that felt like they were made of water. The image remained. His knees gave out when he stood right in front of the wall. Now on a level with his eyes, the image remained.

Garrett reached out with trembling fingers to trace the symbol, completely unfamiliar and yet strangely compelling. The image remained under his fingers, even as he scrubbed his hands over it desperately. Garrett let his eyes and hands fall from the symbol to the words printed underneath. His hands shook as he traced the old familiar loops and whorls of his home, a script he’d never thought to see again.

Hex is Hope.

Garrett wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream until his vocal cords tore themselves to shreds. He wanted to make whoever put this here in this featureless hell bleed. He wanted to clutch their hands and weep in gratitude. He wanted to tear down this terrible, impossible place brick by brick until his fingers bled and the sands swallowed everything whole.

He wanted to go home to his brothers and his father and his mother.

Garrett’s hands clenched into fists as the comfortable, grey numbness that had settled onto him like a funeral shroud shredded like fog in the daylight and the vibrancy of life that had been crushed out of his soul by the - gods above, _years_ \- he’d spent in this place lit like a flame. He screamed, not caring that no-one would hear him through the deathly silence of the soundproofed walls. 

Someone _cared_ , cared enough to leave him something in this soul-destroying monster of a place, and damn the monsters who had made it necessary. He slumped against the wall, panting for breath, and ran his fingers again and again over that script, that little piece of home.

Hex is Hope.

————————————————————————————————-

In a comfortably-appointed bathroom high above the mean streets below, Danica dabbed blood from her face as she examined the remnants from her last fight in the mirror. A black eye that was puffing magnificently, a shallow cut that ran along her temple, and mottled bruising around her throat - it had been close. Too close. And yet not close enough

She didn’t look herself in the eye as she applied the nanite-laden bruise cream to her throat and points northward. Her opponent had given nearly as good as he’d gotten, and it had only been her avatar’s ability to toughen skin to the point of steel that had allowed her to get a knife-handed blow into his midsection and leave him to bleed out on the floor of the arena. The cheering crowd had left her feeling as hollow as her opponent had ended up, and her owner’s disappointment in her performance had manifested in repeated applications of a neural whip.

She couldn’t complain; his way of expressing his pleasure in her victories when she did well left her wishing the neural control input would let her die on her own hand.

After finishing with the nanite gel she started the shower and spent the three allotted minutes scrubbing vigorously before the water shut off and the dermal cleansing lasers took over. The soap and water was evaporated as the laser grid moved slowly from her head to her toes, and the liquid reclamation fans whirred gently in the ceiling as they drew all the leftover moisture into the condenser shafts. The thick, humid air was quickly displaced in favor of the bone-dry dust that was the only natural atmosphere in ARENA - though Danica was enough of a pilot that her room was temperature controlled to something slightly cooler than the choking heat of this awful place.

She walked into her bedroom and her attention was immediately arrested by the words scrawled over her chest of drawers. They hadn’t been there when she’d first gotten back after the “instructions” from her owner, of that she was absolutely certain. And the script was familiar, the words themselves written in a hand she knew - one she hadn’t seen in far, far too long.

Hex is Hope.

Danica walked over, almost hypnotized by the words and the strange symbol above them. She reached out with trembling fingers to the words, written in a messy script that was reminiscent of - had to be - her youngest child’s handwriting, and flinched when her fingers touched the surface; she almost expected them to electrocute her, for daring to reach out at all. But the section of wall that bore the inscription felt like any other piece of wall, the surface unchanged beneath her fingers, and she couldn’t bear it.

The wail that left Danica’s throat was almost inhuman, a ragged shriek of grief and desolation as she sank to the floor. Tears streamed down her face as memories she had long repressed floated to the surface. Memories of soft yellows and browns, of the waving grain jouncing as her children ran through it and laughed, of her own laughter joining theirs as she ran behind them, ducking and weaving through the branches hidden beneath the waving heads of grain. Of a time when her life had meaning beyond the roar of the crowd, the feeling of blood beneath her fingernails, the fear of what her owner would do next.

She wept, sobs wracking her chest even as tears flowed freely down her face. Yet she embraced the pain, welcomed it like an old, forgotten friend, and eventually the tears subsided and sobs eased and she was left staring at the words and symbol as her breathing hitched unevenly. Her chest was lighter than it had been in some time, unable to tear her gaze from the unfamiliar words in the tantalizingly familiar script.

Hex is Hope.

—————————————————————————————————

In a dark and nameless pit somewhere inside the compound of a wealthy Collyseum notable, Kzzkvns slumped silently. Its forelimbs coated in the blood of its most recent opponent, and its wings motionless along its thorax, it might very well have been a very gruesome statue save for the subtle expansion and contraction of its midsection as it breathed. The pit was silent, though a gentle breeze wafted gently around the seven foot tall wasplike humanoid standing at the center.

Kzzkvns supposed it had done well in its most recent fight, though time in the pit passed strangely and it could not say how long ago that fight had been. Nor could it remember much about the fight itself; once the angry, danger-warning chemicals are pumped into the pit it never remembers much of anything at all. The fighting instincts take over and the remembering is put away until it is safe to do so again.

Still, Kzzzkvns was standing and did not have any pain-scent emanating from anywhere, and the food provided had been a much greater quantity than usual. The ones who came sometimes to watch from behind the smooth-cold-mineral section had smelled of smug satisfaction as well, strongly enough to be sensed over the constant wind of chemical despair-sadness-mourning that swirled into the pit from small vents near the top.

Once, it had fought against the dragging chemical scents. Once, it had tried to fly up and out of the pit and back to the hive that it had spawned from. Once, it had screamed in defiance and flared pheromones strong enough to make a warrior-drone flinch away if one had been there. No longer.

Now it stood quiescent, antenna flooded with artificially created despair; a sinking, stinking darkness deeper than even the lightless pit around it could provide. Kzzkvns rarely bothered adjusting its antennae, now, preferring to conserve energy for those times when it could not, when the ones who owned it made it fight in pointless battles that brought no food to the hive against creatures that did not threaten it. It did not understand why it fought any more than it could resist the chemical smog that clouded its days.

Today, though, there was something different. A lighter tone in the drifting stink, a bright note like a ray of sunshine peeking through black storm clouds; something that had most certainly not been there before. For the first time in - days? weeks? It did not know - Kzzkvns moved without prompting. Its antenna waved, trying to locate the new scent, and eventually it stepped toward a patch of wall that had never before born the chemical markers that now drifted from it. It was message-scent, such as it had not known in this strange place that seemed to deal more in concepts than in words.

Uppermost was math - an octagon containing a box, which in itself contained boxes. Such clear math cut through the drifting fog of manufactured sadness and made the message beneath it shine with a much greater clarity. Three words, with the first holding the flavor of the last though they were not the same composition. The middle was a statement of firm being, of a truth so indelible as to be incontrovertible.

Hex is Hope.

Kzzkvns did not know what a Hex was, nor what it might have to do with the symbol above, but hope….It reached out with one long, claw-tipped forelimb and brushed the Hex-word lightly. The hope-scent would bring down retribution upon it, this had been taught over and over again, but to its delight the Hex-scent clung to the claw-tip and nothing happened. No alarms shook its frame, no pain-scents triggered sympathetic responses in its nervous system. Nothing.

Slowly it brought the claw to its face and traced the hive-mark there with this clean, hopeful scent. The scent left upon the wall seemed undiminished, and for the first time in too long it brought its forelimbs up to groom, the palps of its mouth methodically beginning to remove the dried blood. It continued to groom long after the blood-smell and fear-scent of alien creatures faded from its limbs. Now it touched the wall again and again and again and again, spreading the Hex-smell and mind-clearing math-scent all over itself. No matter how much it used, the scent upon the wall remained undiminished, and when it had finally finished coating itself it looked - for the first time in a very, very long time - up to the mouth of the pit and the strange sky beyond and knew light.

Hex is Hope.

——————————————————————————————-

Cysud Warmheart did not shiver as his breath puffed out in front of him in a white fog.

His new owner had only come lately to the city - or had spent a great deal of time in another metaverse until recently. She still bore the scent trails of green and growing things, and did not wholly smell of the dead sands that made this place. It was she who had commanded he be placed into this cold, cold box of a room; his previous owner had simply kept him chained hand, mouth, and foot.

In truth he could not say which he preferred. The cold made him sluggish and sleepy, but the chains had jangled and chafed; when it came right down to it, anything was preferable to the cage of electricity his first owner had used that had kept him trapped in a space far too small for one of his bulk. Such was the way of owners, each taking him with little knowledge of what they held and then forcing him to fight like a dog for their amusement.

He supposed he should be angry about it, but his anger had burnt out long ago. The angry ones raged, and wasted their strength trying to fight those who could not be fought. Most of the time they died choking on their own blood in the dead sands, with those that didn’t die there being put down like rabid animals by guards whose job it was to slaughter without batting an eye. Cysud and those longer-lived knew better than to think rage would solve anything; it was riding that fine line of being just good enough not to be made into stew meat and being just bad enough not to attract the attention of Those On High that let you live the longest.

Cysud was a master of riding the line; he knew when to stop, and when to push an advantage, and never mind what his owners said when he lost. Pain meant you were still alive, after all, and surviving was the most you could hope for out of a day in ARENA.

He sighed and moved the covers on the deep heat-sensing sockets his race had instead of eyes. The room was dull and grim, with the viewing ports clearly outlined in raised temperatures but showing no silhouettes of warm-blood green or working-machinery yellow at this time of the morning. The fading cloud of his breath showed in a dim green haze that faded rapidly to the otherwise uniform grey of the room around him, and more to entertain himself than anything he huffed out another green-warm cloud before a sudden spike in temperature drew his attention to the furthest corner of his cell.

The raised temperature was uneven but bright, and his breath caught in his throat as he drew closer and saw the heat-runes of his people. The symbol above meant nothing to him, but the ones below were as near to him as his own heart and the fact that it took him several long moments to decipher them made his soul ache.

Hex is Hope.

Cysud laughed, an ugly, ragged sound that tore at the air like a sob. This was Collyseum, the festering pustule at the heart of ARENA, and he’d been here for enough centuries to know that there was no hope here. There was nothing but blood and pain and loss.

He huffed a yellow-green breath that hazed the words without concealing them before deliberately turning his back and re-covering his sockets. If there was one thing that got you killed faster in Collyseum than anger, it was hope. Hope made you do stupid shit like stage a revolt, or bite the hand that fed you. Hope was a fool’s desire and a dream so far gone you’d have to have been here before the city rose to find even an inkling of it.

Cysud willed himself back to sleep even as the simple message blazed a warm spot on his hide and his dreams filled with the sound of wings and the warmth of a real sun.

Hex is Hope.

———————————————————————————————-

Hessia’s ears flicked as she prowled around the room.

Something was different today; in the six days since she’d been taken from her home by those, those _things_ , the room she had been thrown into hadn’t changed in the slightest. A hard metal floor which made her feet ache after walking for too long, yet she could no more stop pacing than she could have given up her fur; that floor, four walls, and a ceiling made up the whole of the place, with some strategic holes for waste disposal and the input of food. She’d clawed the hand that first pushed in some deeply unappetizing foodstuffs bloody, and thereafter the food had been pushed in using some sort of pole that she usually savaged anyway to make a point.

But today something was different. The hackles along her spine rose as she paced and paced and paced; food had not yet been put in for the day but it wasn’t the appointed time for that. The water in the container was low, but it would refill from a tube in the bottom - she had seen it happen. She was still trapped in this unfamiliar place that stank of death, but the moment the door opened she had a plan about that - one much better thought out than her last three escape attempts.

On her fourth turn across the cell, she spotted something. Something that had not been there the last time she’d walked the length of the cell. Approaching carefully, she nearly shrieked in rage as the script of her home became clear underneath a meaningless symbol.

Hex is Hope.

A _curse_ was hope? It was some sort of trick! Howling in fury she leaped forward and set her claws to the metal. The noise was horrific, keratin dragging over stainless steel, and she flattened her ears but kept going. How dare they! How dare they mock her with false promises after trapping her here! She was strong, her claws were sharp, and she _refused_ to let this affront stand.

Finally Hessia fell back, panting heavily even as blood dripped from her paws where some of her claws had shredded down to the quick or torn the skin around where they anchored to her fingers. The wall was a mess, deep gouges criss-crossing in bloody streaks over dents large enough to be considered a crude form of shelving, and she felt a momentary flicker of pride at the damage done. If her claws could do that to steel, then they would do as much to her captors when she caught them.

That pride was lost in confusion, however, as she beheld the words that were still there, the symbol above them still perfectly symmetrical despite the gouges and dents that marred the surface it rested upon. None had entered to repair it, yet here it was. She approached the wall slowly, tail still and puffed out. Her captors had not done this?

Hessia reached out and traced the words with one trembling, bleeding finger. Hex meant curse, and yet the declivation markers on the symbol that comprised the whole of that word meant a noun. A Name. She had thought that it was simply a case of poor writing, and yet with the evidence before her she had her doubts. Magic wasn’t unknown to her people, though the stories she’d heard had always been more to do with fire than this kind of spell. A malediction of fire was one thing, but the power to embed words into the very essence of an object? That was a power she knew not, and one her captors hadn’t shown at all.

Slowly she closed her eyes and prayed to any god that would listen that this curse would be for her enemies, and that the hope it brought would be the fire that would bring her home.

Hex is Hope.

——————————————————————————————-

_And sweetest in the gale is heard;  
And sore must be the storm  
That could abash the little bird  
That kept so many warm._


End file.
